Professor Phil Withington learns how alcohol in general and spirits in particular shaped European encounters with the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. He also learns how elite views of indigenous drinking were not so very different to caricatures of working-class consumption closer to home.

Guests:

Dr Lila O’Leary is a historian of race, slavery and commodification in the early modern Atlantic, and a research fellow at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. She is also the co-founder and an editorial board member for the online magazine Insurrect!

Recent articles include:

• Alcohol Diplomacy, Gender and Power in the Late Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast Slaving Complex in Past & Present.

Dr Deborah Toner is an Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Leicester, whose research interests include the social, cultural and literary history of alcohol and drinking places in Mexico. She is co-convenor of the Drinking Studies Network, an interdisciplinary research group that brings together scholars who work on any aspect of drink and drinking culture in any society and in any time period.

Publications include:

• Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Dr Angela McShane is Honorary Reader in History at the University of Warwick. She has recently worked collaboratively on a book and website and with Christopher Marsh and Andy Watt on 100 Ballads.

Currently she is completing a monograph on the history of the ballad trade and its politics.

Full transcript available here.